Tolstoy in his immensity still overshadows our horizon; but as a traveller in a land of mountains sees, with each receding step, appear above the nearest peak one loftier yet, screened hitherto by the surrounding heights, some eager spirits herald perchance the rise of Dostoevsky behind Tolstoy’s giant figure. This cloud-capped summit is the secret heart of the chain and source of many a generous stream in whose waters the Europe of to-day may slake her strange new thirsts. Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy, merits rank beside Ibsen and Nietzsche: great as they, mayhap the mightiest of the three.
In Germany translations of Dostoevsky are multiplying, each an advance on its predecessor as regards vigour and scrupulous accuracy. England, stubborn and slow to move, yet makes it her concern not to be outstripped. When he introduced Mrs. Constance Garnett’s translation in the New Age, Arnold Bennett wished all English novelists and short story writers could come under the influence of these “most powerful works of the imagination ever produced.” Speaking more particularly of The Brothers Karamazov, he declared this book, in which human passion reaches its maximum intensity, contains about a dozen figures that are simply colossal. Who can tell if these colossal figures have ever made, even in Russia, so direct appeal as to us, whether their call sounded ever before so pressing?
Dostoevsky’s admirers were recently rare enough, but as invariably happens when the earliest enthusiasts are recruited from the élite, their number goes on increasing steadily. First of all, I should like to inquire how it is that certain minds are still obdurately prejudiced against his work, admirable though it be. Because the best way to overcome a lack of comprehension is to accept it as sincere and try to understand it.
The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute, and often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their appearance that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people aver, real life that he unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this is utterly mistaken; but let us grant the truth of it for argument’s sake, and refrain from answering after the manner of Freud that there is more sincerity in our dream-life than in the actions of our real existence. Hear rather what Dostoevsky has to say for himself on the subject of dreams: “These obvious absurdities and impossibilities with which your dream was overflowing ... you accepted all at once, almost without the slightest surprise, at the very time when, on another side, your reason was at its highest tension and showed extraordinary power, cunning, sagacity, and logic. And why, too, on waking and fully returning to reality, do you feel almost every time, and sometimes with extraordinary intensity, that you have left something unexplained behind with the dream, and at the same time you feel that interwoven with these absurdities some thought lies hidden, and a thought that is real, something belonging to your actual life, something that exists and always has existed in your heart. It’s as though something new, prophetic, that you were awaiting, has been told you in your dream.”[1]
What Dostoevsky says here about dreams we shall apply to his own books, not for a moment that I would consider assimilating these stories to the absurdities of certain dreams, because we feel when we leave one of his books, even should our reason refuse complete agreement with it, that he has laid his finger on some obscure spot “which is part of our actual life.” In this, I think, we shall find explained the refusal of certain minds, in the name of Western-European civilization, to admit Dostoevsky’s genius, because I readily observe that in all our Western literature (and I do not limit myself to French alone) the novel, with but rare exceptions, concerns itself solely with relations between man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social, and class relations, but never, practically never with the relations between the individual and his self or his God, which are to Dostoevsky all important. I fancy nothing could better illustrate my idea than the reflection made by a Russian and quoted in Mme. Hoffmann’s biography, the best by far I know, but which unfortunately has not yet been translated. His reflection, she holds, will enable us to discern one of the peculiarities of the Russian soul. Once reproached with his unpunctuality this Russian gravely retorted: “Yes, life is difficult! There are moments that must be lived well, and this is more important than the keeping of any engagement.”[2] The inner life is thus more highly prized than relations with one’s fellow-man. Here lies Dostoevsky’s secret, the thing which makes him for some so great, for many others so insufferable!
Not for a moment do I suggest that in Western Europe, in France, for example, man is wholly a social being, ever dressed for a part. We have Pascal’s Thoughts and the Fleurs du Mal, strangely solitary and profound, yet as French as any other works in our literature. But a certain category of problems, heart-searchings, passions, and associations seem to be the province of the moralist and the theologian, and a novelist has no call to burden himself with them. The miracle Dostoevsky accomplished consists in this: each of his characters—and he created a world of them—lives by virtue of his own personality, and these intimately personal beings, each with his peculiar secret, are introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity. The wonder of it is that the problems are lived over by each of his characters, or rather let us say the problems exist at the expense of his characters: problems which conflict, struggle, and assume human guise to perish or triumph before our eyes.
No question too transcendent for Dostoevsky to handle in one of his novels; but, having said this, I am bound at once to add that he never approaches a question from the abstract, ideas never exist for him but as functions of his characters, wherein lies their perpetual relativity and source of power. One individual evolves a certain theory concerning God, providence, and life eternal because he knows he must die in a few days’ time, in a few hours maybe (Ippolit in The Idiot): another (in The Possessed) builds up an entire system of metaphysics, containing Nietzsche in embryo, on the premise of self-destruction, for in a quarter of an hour he is going to take his own life, and hearing him speak, it is impossible to distinguish whether his philosophy postulates his suicide or his suicide his philosophy. Prince Myshkin owes his most wonderful, most heavenly raptures to the imminence of an epileptic fit. In conclusion I have only one comment to offer: though pregnant with thought, Dostoevsky’s novels are never abstract, indeed, of all the books I know, they are the most palpitating with life.
Representative as Dostoevsky’s characters are, they never seem to forsake their humanity to become mere symbols or the types familiar in our classical drama. They keep their individuality which is as specific as in Dickens’s most peculiar creations, and as powerfully drawn and painted as any portrait in any literature.
Listen to this: “There are people whom it is difficult to describe correctly in their typical and characteristic aspect. These are the people who are usually called ‘the mass,’ ‘the majority,’ and who do actually make up the vast majority of mankind. To this class of ‘commonplace’ or ‘ordinary’ people belong certain persons of my tale, such as Gavril Ardalionovitch.”[3]
Now, this is a character particularly difficult to delineate. What will he succeed in telling us about him?
“A profound and continual consciousness of his own lack of talent, and at the same time the overwhelming desire to prove to himself that he was a man of great independence, had rankled in his heart from boyhood up. He was a young man of violent and envious cravings, who seemed to have been positively born with his nerves overwrought. The violence of his desires he took for strength. This passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-considered actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge. That drove him to despair.”[4] And this for one of the least important characters in the book! I must add that the others, the chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving them to limn in their own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in the course of the narrative. His principal characters are always in course of formation, never quite emerging from the shadows. In passing, note how profoundly different he is from Balzac, whose chief care seems ever to be the perfect consistency of his characters. Balzac paints like David; Dostoevsky like Rembrandt, and his portraits are artistically so powerful and often so perfect that even if they lacked the depths of thought that lie behind them, and around them, I believe that Dostoevsky would still be the greatest of all novelists.